At seventeen, Anselm Kiefer embarked on a pilgrimage—funded by a travel grant—that would quietly shape his trajectory. He first followed Vincent van Gogh’s ghost south, through the Low Countries, across Belgium, past Paris, down to Arles’ burning light. He returned carrying more than sketches. Something of Van Gogh’s tormented mark-making, his relentless churning of pigment and psyche, lodged itself in the young German’s practice. Not homage, but a kind of inherited recklessness—one that would later surface in Kiefer’s own scorched canvases, where straw becomes both crop and corpse.
Simon Schama’s taut new monograph, published by the Royal Academy to coincide with Kiefer’s 80th birthday, resists making tidy comparisons. Instead, it lets these two artists’ obsessions collide: Van Gogh’s writhing wheatfields meet Kiefer’s necropolises of ash and iron. Both men worked the earth like an open wound.
Kiefer’s origins demand this roughness. Born in March 1945, as Germany’s ruins still smoked, his art became an exorcism—less about confronting history than dissecting how myths fester. His infamous Occupations series (1969) saw him photograph himself performing the Nazi salute at European landmarks, not as mockery but as a scalpel slicing through collective amnesia. The question wasn’t “Why remember?” but “How?”
Materials mutate under his hands. Lead sheets become pages; sunflowers, their seeds long dead, press against cracked resin-like specimens in a mortician’s cabinet. When Kiefer abandoned Germany for rural France in 1993, converting a derelict silk factory into the labyrinthine La Ribaute complex, he wasn’t retreating—he was building an archive for civilisations yet to collapse.
Schama’s text navigates this terrain without maps. Kiefer’s layered visual excavations include Germanic folklore bleeding into Kabbalistic mysticism; Scorched earth and winter fields abound. – PCR
Book Information ISBN 9781915815170 Author Simon Schama Format Hardback Imprint Royal Academy of Arts – Publisher Royal Academy of Arts